


Brienne, Jaime, and the Accidental Marriage

by angel_deux



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Accidental Marriage, F/M, Well Meaning Swamp Teen Jojen Reed Accidentally Marries Best Friends and Roommates, hey guess what? i have no idea how newspapers work and yet i picked that prompt anyway, reporters au, well jaime's a reporter and brienne's a photographer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:21:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25828129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: Best friends, co-workers, and roommates Brienne and Jaime were supposed to head to Greywater Watch to cover a local festival for the newspaper at which they both work. They were NOT supposed to get married while they were there.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 56
Kudos: 399
Collections: Jaime x Brienne Fic Exchange 2020





	Brienne, Jaime, and the Accidental Marriage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theunpaidcritic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theunpaidcritic/gifts).



> Written for the Jaime Brienne Fic Exchange 2020, for theunpaidcritic! I managed to do 2 of your 3 prompts (Jaime + Brienne work at a newspaper + Accidental Marriage). I guess they also kind of do the third prompt: "solving a mystery"? Do their feelings count as a mystery? It's your gift, so you be the judge! 
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

They head straight from the airport to the office, though Jaime puts in a good effort to argue his case; he’s in favor of stopping at home and then taking the rest of the day off.

“We’re jetlagged,” he insists, even though it was only a three hour flight. Brienne wins the argument, as she has won most of the arguments in their years of working together, because while Jaime is good at charming his way into winning arguments with _other_ people, Brienne has developed a certain immunity to him, and he has yet to come up with any new tactics to combat that.

Jetlag or no, she _is_ exhausted when they step out of the Kings Landing heat and into the air conditioning of the Brotherhood office. Their early partnership, at their old publication, involved a lot of running from things and getting into trouble, yet somehow this several day trip to Greywater Watch feels more draining than _that_ ever did. Brienne tries to convince herself that it’s nothing to do with her complicated emotions, or the harrowing realization she came to last night. No, it’s just the change in weather; they spent a little more than four days in Greywater, checking out the highlights of the Green Fork festival, and in those four days, Brienne got used to the cooler, slightly humid air. The mugginess of Kings Landing seems unbearable in comparison. Maybe it’s not jetlag, but it’s _something_. Maybe they _should_ have taken the rest of the day off.

Not that she’s going to tell Jaime that. The man is her best friend, but he’s always _unbearable_ when she concedes to something.

Addam greets them when they step off the elevator with a good-natured greeting that tells Brienne that Jaime, somehow, hasn’t already filled him in. She’d braced herself for jokes all the way up the elevator. Maybe all the way back from Greywater. Addam is a great guy, but like Jaime, he hasn’t met a situation he can’t turn into something to laugh at. Brienne was sure that he would start the moment they appeared, but she doesn’t even sense the kind of comedic restraint that would mean he was waiting for a moment of maximum impact. She turns to look at Jaime, who’s already grinning at her.

“You didn’t tell him,” she says.

“Didn’t tell me what?” Addam asks, perking up. Addam is one of those people who pretends not to be interested in gossip, but not very well.

“I figured I’d let you do the honors,” Jaime replies blithely to Brienne, ignoring his friend. “Since the whole thing is your fault.”

Brienne rolls her eyes and heads to her desk. Addam follows her. Jaime laughs.

“ _What’s_ your fault?” Addam asks. “What happened? What’d you do?” More and more eager, like a puppy denied the treat someone’s waving right in front of his face. He’s ready to laugh at both of them. Jaime’s more than ready to do the same. Brienne’s the only one who’s actually upset about this, apparently, and it gives her this itchy, hive-like feeling under her skin. Like she knows she’s projecting her annoyance for everyone to see, even though she’s trying to stay as blank and unbothered as possible.

“Ask her how the festival was,” Jaime says from across the room, plopping his work laptop down on his desk and waiting, still grinning, looking like the asshole he was when she met him right out of college.

“How was the festival?” Addam asks, intensely. “The stuff you sent back was really great. Catelyn can’t shut up about your pictures, Bri. _Please_ tell me what happened.”

Slightly mollified by Addam’s compliments, Brienne sighs and turns to look at him.

“It was a lovely festival overall. Howland Reed was a perfect host. I’ll have to thank Catelyn for putting us in contact with him.”

“And?” Addam prompts. Brienne sighs again, louder.

“And we accidentally got married.”

“You and Howland Reed got married?” Addam’s grin is growing, his eyes going all sharp and knowing, plainly understanding what went down but wanting to hear her say it. Brienne squares her shoulders, glares at him, and tries to sound unbothered. She fails.

“Jaime and I,” she says, biting off her words. “Accidentally got married.”

“Brilliant,” Addam breathes.

* * *

Jaime, of course, has found the whole thing hilarious from the moment they realized what had happened. Which makes it worse, because it’s her fault _and_ she’s the only one annoyed about it. _She_ was the one who thought they should be polite and let Jojen Reed perform his ritual about harmony and becoming one with your past and the inevitable power of spirals or whatever it was he was talking about. He was the son of their host, and it only seemed right that if Jaime was going to be writing all about the Green Fork festival, he should at least write _something_ about the Greenseers. It's a dying practice of the Crannogmen—half religious organization, half ecological preservation philosophy—and Brienne thought it would be interesting for Jaime’s readers to get a little insight into why a young man like Jojen is trying so hard to keep the practice of Greensight alive.

Jaime clearly regarded the whole thing as an excuse for the young man to get high and pretend to see things in the smoke. The moment Jojen showed up in a hooded robe and lit a brazier filled with pungent herbs, Brienne saw Jaime’s brain fizzle out completely. But Jaime’s a sensitive man and a good travel writer despite his long history of religious skepticism, and he has trouble saying no to Brienne. So with a little patient prodding on her part, he agreed to participate in Jojen’s attempts at Greenseeing. They blocked up all the windows of the hut, put a towel under the door, and discretely coughed into their fists for twenty or so minutes while Jojen spoke in a dreamy, affected voice about fuck all.

_How_ that ended with the two of them being married in the eyes of the old gods, Brienne still isn’t really sure. Jojen said a lot of things about fate and destiny and red strings and reincarnation, and Brienne and Jaime nodded politely along while Jaime pretended to take notes (his notes were later revealed to mostly contain variations of _fucking hell, Brienne, look at what you’ve gotten us into_ ) and Brienne snapped a few pictures of Jojen’s bloodshot eyes as he leaned closer to the smoke, claiming to see images that explained everything. Brienne never managed to see anything. Just smoke. Just Jojen’s unsettling gaze. _She,_ at least, gave it a proper go. Said something bizarre about maybe seeing a snail’s shell? Or something? Jojen seemed pleased, in any case. Jaime didn’t bother. Just said, “oh yes, very interesting” and continued to look unimpressed.

She has to give Jaime _some_ credit: the eventual write-up for his post on the newspaper’s travel blog was respectful, thoughtful, and only slightly tongue-in-cheek. He hasn’t written the full article yet, but she knows it will be the same. As much as he can be an emotionally stunted wrecking ball of a man, he’s good at pretending not to be when it comes to his chosen profession, and Brienne has faith in him. He probably won’t even mention that the whole thing turned out to be a wedding ceremony in which they had no idea they were participating.

* * *

In private, though, he can’t shut up about it. He’d been annoyed in the first moments after Jojen revealed that he’d married them according to the will of the old gods. By Brienne’s estimate, it was probably like five seconds. Then he started laughing, and then he started joking, and he has been impossible ever since. When Jojen refused to undo what he did, Jaime laughed. When they had to leave and get on a flight and couldn’t even appeal to Jojen’s father to try and get the boy to come around, Jaime laughed. When Brienne glowered and sulked and scowled the whole way home, Jaime laughed hard enough for the both of them.

“He’s a _kid_ ,” he says, dismissively, after she has ground out the speediest possible version of the story for Addam. Addam can’t stop gaping in delight through the entire thing, which makes it even more insulting. “He forgot what he was supposed to be doing. I told you he was high.”

“We’re _married_ ,” Brienne reminds him.

“In the eyes of the Crannogmen! And not even _legally._ Just by whoever still believes in the old gods as the Greenseers interpret them. That’s, what, twenty people? We wouldn’t even get tax benefits if we moved to Greywater.” He glances at Addam, shrugs one shoulder. “I asked Tyrion.”

“Course you did,” Addam laughs. He’s sprawled in Brienne’s seat, twisting back and forth every time one of them speaks, like he’s watching an intense boxing match and not an argument between roommates, co-workers, and, well, technically spouses.

“It’s still…it’s _marriage_ , Jaime,” she says. He may be forty and too cynical about relationships to ever give it a real shot, but _she’s_ just barely thirty, and she hasn’t given up quite yet.

“It’s a _religious_ marriage. In a religion neither of us celebrate.”

“You don’t celebrate _any_ religion.”

“Exactly! And you don’t celebrate Greenseeing, so we’re square. A legal marriage would be way more difficult to get out of.”

“Your brother is a divorce lawyer. We could literally just _text_ him to get it done. Now we have to go back to Greywater and try and bully a teenager into undoing something he did by mistake.”

“This is the heart of the argument,” Jaime says aside to Addam. “She thinks we need to get it annulled.”

“Nah,” Addam opines. “Keep it. It makes a good story, anyway. I could get you guys a wedding gift if you want. Blender or something.”

“You’re not helping,” Brienne tells him.

“Oh, believe me, I’m not trying to.”

“I want a divorce,” Brienne tells Jaime, more firm this time, but the firmness doesn’t change the fact that he still just laughs at her.

* * *

After enduring Addam’s jokes for at least twenty minutes and then turning in all the equipment they borrowed for the trip, Brienne and Jaime head back home, where only Jaime’s jokes must be tolerated.

He mostly behaves himself until they’re actually _in_ the townhouse they share, and then it’s endless.

“We can finally turn the second bedroom into an office,” he says, almost as soon as the door is closed behind them. “Since obviously I’ll be moving into yours. It’s the biggest, and I’ve been eyeing that master bedroom for years.”

“Your room _was_ my office until you moved in _temporarily_ three years ago,” Brienne reminds him as she sorts through the mail that has been left on the kitchen table by their neighbor, Pod.

“And now we’re married. What a great story to tell the kids.”

“Ugh,” Brienne replies, which makes Jaime laugh, because _everything_ is making Jaime laugh about this situation. Sometimes, Brienne wishes she could be so careless about things. And it’s not like she doesn’t understand that it was hard won, in Jaime’s case. He went through a lot before she met him, and a lot _after_ she met him. Now that she knows him better, now that she knows the kinds of things that he’s dealt with, she understands his impulse to laugh, and underreact, and refuse to take things seriously.

He told her once that he used to be even worse. She generally finds _that_ hard to believe, which is what she told him. But actually, she can see it, sometimes, when he’s butting heads with someone he doesn’t like. She has known him and been his friend for long enough now that she knows she’s seeing the true Jaime when she’s with him, and that the sneering, arrogant façade he uses is just that—a screen behind which he hides when he’s feeling insecure or vulnerable. There is nothing Jaime hates more than being vulnerable.

Brienne gets a little sad when she thinks of him hiding behind that screen as a permanent state, in the years before they met. Because he’s a good person, Jaime, for all her annoyances with him. She wouldn’t have said that in their first year working together, when she was partnered with him as his photographer, following him around the world as he wrote bold, important pieces for his father’s nature magazine. Jaime in those days was arrogant, cold, utterly convinced of his own brilliance. He was so young when he wrote the exposé that destroyed Aerys Targaryen, and it had fed into his ego for years afterward. Young, handsome, wealthy. She’d hated him from the start, but it was a good job, and she was just out of college, and it promised the kind of excitement she had been sure she wanted. He wasn’t necessarily mean to _her_. He never treated her with that kind of rudeness that she has seen him deploy like a precision weapon against others. He mocked her silence and her stoniness, but he respected her from the beginning, and they worked well together even though she didn’t like him.

It was a shit job, though. Soul-sucking, in its way. She can’t say she regrets it. They went to a lot of fascinating places together, and they met a lot of interesting people. She can’t even say that she would go back in time and warn her younger self not to take the position. She loves Jaime. He’s her best friend. She’s glad that she met him, and she’s glad that they went through what they went through together, because it has strengthened their bond into the kind of partnership that she wouldn’t have even _dreamed_ of when she was in school and trying to figure out what she was going to do with a fucking photography degree. But she’s glad that they’re not there anymore.

They were there for too long, though. Dealing with the politics of the Lannister family, all of them trying to warn her or use her or manipulate her to their own ends, just because she had Jaime’s ear and all of his family members seemed to want it for some reason or another. Then the accident that tore up her cheek and took Jaime’s right hand, which turned out not to be an accident at all, but a poorly calculated attempt at reining Jaime in by his own father. _Then_ the incident where the Lannisters started buying up local papers so that they could control the narrative around their political aims.

When Brienne realized what Casterly Publications was becoming, she quit. Jaime followed her a year later to Pennytree, and then to Stoneheart Press, where they are now. He was already cynical when she met him. Already burned out by the loss of idealism that happens to so many journalists. She doesn’t think she would have blamed him if the loss of his hand and the loss of his respect for his family made him even _more_ so. Instead, it brought some of that idealism back. It made him lighter. Less dry. Less angry without direction. She saw the changes in him, has been with him through most of them. How can she stay annoyed with him for being too light-hearted now about something _she_ wants to be angry about?

* * *

He picks up on it, later, after they’ve both unpacked and showered and are approaching normality again. Jaime’s rifling through takeout menus because it’s his turn to cook and he doesn’t feel like it. Brienne’s filing away the bills she got earlier.

Jaime will leave his on the kitchen table for weeks before suddenly remembering that he has to pay them. Brienne’s gotten used to it.

“Hey, you’re actually upset about this, aren’t you?” he asks suddenly. Looking up from the menus as if it’s a thought that has somehow occurred to him while perusing the offerings of The Crossroads Deli.

And she _was_ upset about it. Literally up until he asked her if she was upset about it, she was upset about it. But now that he’s asked, she feels her anger deflating.

“It’s stupid,” she admits. “I’m not upset about it.”

“You are. I’m sorry.”

“Shut up.”

“No, I mean it. I think it’s hilarious, but you clearly don’t.”

She hates that he’s saying that so openly. Hates that he’s right, and hates that she’s being so weird about it.

“It’s not a big deal.” She tries to believe it. Tries to _make_ herself believe it, because she really doesn’t want to be such a sore sport about this. There are some things she’s learned to take a lot less seriously since she and Jaime moved in together, because he has the kind of personality that inevitably warps the people close to him if he sticks around for long enough. There’s really no reason that _this_ can’t be the same. Just her own brain, overthinking things. Making things uncomfortable when Jaime’s just trying to make a joke.

“What’s the problem?” he asks. He puts the takeout menus down and leans against the kitchen doorway, looking all rumpled and handsome in a way that Brienne was once sure she had developed an immunity to. “I didn’t think you were _that_ religious. I know you keep with the Seven, but…”

“It’s not that. I don’t know. I just keep thinking ‘what if I want to marry a Crannogman some day, and I can’t, because I’m already married according to the Greenseers’.”

Jaime laughs at that, which she’s actually glad of, because it was a stupid excuse, and not sincerely meant. She pushes past him into the kitchen to look at the menus.

“I don’t think we met a man in Greywater who would even reach your shoulder,” he points out.

“Maybe I like shorter men,” she fires back. He just grins a little, pointedly tilting his head back, like he wants to emphasize the fact that he has to look up at her to meet her eyes.

* * *

Catelyn Stark plucked Jaime and Brienne personally from The Pennytree Journal. Brienne had interned for Catelyn in her final year of school, but took the job with the Lannisters when Catelyn couldn’t afford to hire her full time. It was the Lannisters who were driving smaller publications like Winterfell Weekly out of print, but Brienne needed a job. She has always felt guilty about the fact that Winterfell Weekly folded only a few years after she interned there. Catelyn had been a good boss. Idealistic, maybe, and now that Brienne’s a bit older, she thinks Catelyn was naïve to think that she could continue running the paper in the way her late husband’s family had run it since its inception, without modernizing any aspect of it. It was a nice thing, to want to honor Ned by keeping his legacy intact. But print media had already been on the verge of collapse, and the Lannisters made everything worse by squeezing out anything that wasn’t owned by their massive conglomerate.

It was a bit of a surprise to Brienne when her old boss reached out, not long after Jaime joined Brienne at Pennytree. Catelyn had learned her lesson with Winterfell Weekly; Stoneheart was a much more diverse operation. She opened Winterfell Weekly back up under the umbrella of Stoneheart, modernized and much more adaptable. She also bought several newspapers in her home city of Riverrun, and operated The Brotherhood Free Press out of the Kings Landing office.

The whole thing was perfectly designed to piss Tywin Lannister off, because smaller publications trusted Catelyn Stark more than him to run their businesses, and Catelyn had money and options and the kind of reputation that made her real competition to him. Her son Robb tended to be the public face of the company, but everyone knew that Catelyn was the real maven behind the old man’s rage.

Everyone, of course, included Jaime. When Catelyn came asking them to transfer, he agreed immediately, giddy for the chance to take a real stand against his father.

“Leaving was good,” he’d said to Brienne at the time. “But I won’t feel right about it until I’m standing against him openly. Pennytree isn’t big enough. Stoneheart will hit him where it hurts.”

Brienne had agreed to go along with him, though privately she had still been convinced, back then, that he had followed her from Casterly out of a kind of petty, private rebellion, and that he would go back to his family at the first sign of reconciliation.

But that never happened, and now they’re an unshakable duo. Jaime the travel writer and Brienne the photographer. A team so solid that most of their coworkers seem to forget that it isn’t strictly speaking a partnership: technically, Jaime could just choose from the pool of photographers for his travels. Technically, Catelyn could send Brienne along to any site to photograph for any journalist. But she doesn’t. And no one else asks for her. It’s pretty well established that she’s Jaime’s, and he’s hers.

Which, okay. In that context, Brienne can understand why Catelyn’s laughing at them before they’re even fully through the door and in her office for their meeting, the day after their return.

“I take it you’ve talked to Addam,” Jaime says good-naturedly, sliding into the chair in front of Catelyn’s desk, simmering with that easy grace and travel-worn attractiveness that makes him the perfect person for the stupid travel vlogs that he supplements his articles with.

(It’s also what makes Brienne’s job about a thousand times easier, though she’d never mention that to him.)

“I have,” Catelyn says. She likes Jaime. Brienne knows she does, because she lets Jaime get away with the kind of shit she wouldn’t accept from anyone else. And there’s a particular fond way she speaks to him, all barely hidden amusement. It’s not hidden at all, now.

Brienne had expected Catelyn to be annoyed, maybe angry, that they would be so foolish and unprofessional while representing the paper in an official capacity. She went to bed last night dreading this meeting, and woke up this morning dreading this meeting, and spent the whole ride in thinking that they were in for the reaming of their life. Sure, as far as stunts go, Jaime has pulled worse, and more dangerous, but that just means that Brienne expected Catelyn to be at the absolute end of her rope with him, and Brienne by extension.

“You’re taking this better than I expected,” Jaime says, apparently reading Brienne’s thoughts. He glances back at her, gesturing for her to sit beside him, and she realizes that she has been hovering in the doorway like a guilty child. She moves to sit in the other chair, embarrassed. Something about Catelyn Stark’s office always turns her back into an undergrad, desperate for her boss’s approval.

“I was able to put you in touch with Howland Reed because the Reeds are good family friends of ours,” Catelyn explains. “You wouldn’t be the first people to wind up in the middle of some well-intentioned weirdness from Jojen. He’s a good boy. Just…overzealous about his chosen path.”

“That’s a kind way of putting it,” Jaime says, grinning.

It raises something heavy off of Brienne’s chest to hear Catelyn laughing about it and treating it with amusement instead of annoyance. Brienne doesn’t think she’s _there_ quite yet, but at least she doesn’t feel _as_ humiliated.

“The Reeds are good people,” Catelyn says. “I’ve already reached out to Howland to inform him of the, uh, situation.”

“I’m sure the two of you had a great laugh at our expense,” Jaime says. Catelyn smiles, and doesn’t answer, which is a _yes_.

“The festival continues next week. I know we had agreed that you would only attend the first half, but I think now it’s worth returning.”

“Because you want me to include the marriage in the article.”

“Yes, and the dissolving of it. If you feel comfortable with it. You don’t have to include Brienne’s name.”

“All right,” Jaime says. He doesn’t even look at Brienne for confirmation. Once, it would have felt dismissive. Now, she just knows that he knows her. He doesn’t have to ask her if she wants her name attached to something like an accidental marriage that’s all her fault for being too trusting. Of _course_ she doesn’t.

“Howland thinks you can probably convince Jojen to perform a divorce rite. Of course, they don’t call it that. It’s something about _uncoupling_.” Catelyn’s mouth twitches just slightly as she otherwise manages to hold back her laughter. Jaime groans aloud.

“Do we have to?” he asks. “What if he just marries us _again_. Double marriage. Twice as married.”

“Somehow, I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

“I didn’t think we’d have to worry about ending up married by a drugged-out teenager in a swamp, but here we are.”

“Ask Jojen for the divorce,” Catelyn says, firmly. There’s an odd sort of pointedness in her tone that makes Brienne think Catelyn is _referencing_ something, or trying to hint at something to Jaime and not Brienne. “And give him a nice write-up about it. It shouldn’t be too hard for you to make it funny.”

“But then I can’t go around annoying my wife every day,” Jaime says, just a bit whiny and pouty about it. Catelyn’s smile is tolerant.

“Something tells me you won’t let a thing like _uncoupling_ stop you from causing poor Brienne constant irritation,” she says. She meets Brienne’s eyes, amusement still twinkling in them, but there’s a level of pity in them that makes Brienne’s skin suddenly feel quite tight. She wishes she was less predictable. Wishes she wasn’t so obvious, so much herself that everyone knows without having to be told that she’s taking this too seriously.

It’s not that she thinks they’re making fun of her. It’s just that old habits die hard, and protecting herself from mockery and snide looks was second nature when she was a child. She grew out of it, gradually gained confidence somewhere between graduating high school and graduating college, and she no longer expects the worst of everyone.

It’s just. An impulse. A desire to hide everything away. She has allowed Jaime to come closer to her than anyone else in her life. Has allowed him to see past those walls more often than not. But there is still something about being the butt of the joke that causes her to want to curl up and put all those walls back in place.

“It would make a better story,” she says, trying to sound bored. “The accidental marriage, and going back to have it done away with.” Jaime looks her way with a creased-forehead frown of almost-betrayal. She shrugs. “Catelyn’s right.”

* * *

Brienne leaves the meeting first, after Catelyn gives them the information on their flight out to Greywater and the hotel at which they’ll be staying. A nicer one than last time, like a consolation. Catelyn wants to ask Jaime a few things about his latest video, so Brienne heads to her desk to start going through the pictures she took for the festival. They’ll have a few days in the office before they have to head back to Greywater, and Brienne wants to make sure that she has everything ready for whenever Jaime decides to start uploading his articles. She’s been working with him for long enough to know that he’ll want to post the stuff about the food, first, and then the tourist destinations, and then Greywater Watch itself, and probably _then_ the Jojen Reed fiasco, especially since they’re going back next week to rectify it.

Addam watches her as she boots up her computer and gets to work on editing the pictures and setting aside the ones she likes the best. Jaime stays in Catelyn’s office, the two of them talking very seriously, which is worrying enough on its own without the added irritation of an extra set of eyes on her. Addam actually manages to wait fifteen minutes before giving up on feigning indifference and heading over to Brienne’s desk.

“What?” she asks, short and clipped and just amused enough to not veer into total rudeness.

“What’s the verdict?”

“She’s sending us back to Greywater to have Jojen fix this.”

“ _Boo_.”

“As if the technicality of it is going to stop you from making jokes.”

“Point,” Addam concedes thoughtfully. He sits on the edge of her desk, playing idly with her camera, not looking at her. Like he’s trying to be sly, but Brienne doesn’t really know what he’s aiming for. “What’d Jaime have to say about it?”

“He thinks it would be funnier if we stayed married.”

“He’s right.”

“I’m so sorry my desire to not be accidentally married is getting in the way of all the laughs,” she says dryly, snatching her camera away from him. “Don’t you have work to do?”

“Nothing fun, no. The two of you really haven’t talked about it, have you?”

“Talked about what? The marriage? What is there to talk about? It was an accident. We’re going to have it fixed. It’s really not as big a deal as everyone’s making it out to be.”

Addam’s expression twists into a smile. Like Catelyn’s, it’s oddly knowing, and sort of pitying, and Brienne feels a stab of insecurity that only makes her angrier. Her walls are up. No one can see. She’s sure of it. She’s just paranoid.

* * *

The following week, Brienne and Jaime again board a plane to Greywater. The mood’s a lot grimmer this time. Jaime’s a bit cranky about the early time of the flight, and he dozes in the car on the way to the airport and then falls asleep on her shoulder almost immediately once they sit down to wait to board. He’s wearing sunglasses, and an only mostly buttoned up white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and Brienne finds the whole thing _very_ obnoxious. Both because he looks particularly handsome and because he looks like an asshole. He’s been keeping his hair longer, lately, too, and she sometimes fantasizes about cutting it short again for her own sanity. This divorce can’t come soon enough. Or _uncoupling._ Or whatever.

The flight is uneventful, and Jaime’s poor mood lessens a bit as he begins to work. He likes to bitch and moan about their job, but once he gets going, his mood _always_ improves. He also has this habit of denigrating the work he does now. When he worked for his father, he was winning awards and doing hard-hitting stuff. Climbing nearly impossible mountain peaks and delving into dangerous forests and spending weeks at a time traveling with mercenary groups. Brienne’s glad that Catelyn has settled him, getting him into culture and lifestyle writing that likely won’t win him any more awards but also probably won’t lose him another limb. Jaime pretends not to be glad about it, pretends to be embarrassed at how far he has fallen, but Brienne knows he’s secretly relieved.

The hotel they’ve been given this time around is a noticeable upgrade, and they end up in a suite with two rooms, which Jaime is plainly pleased with. He flops almost immediately onto the couch and puts on one of the nature channels, which is all he watches at _their_ house, too. The entire time, all through the flight and the drive to the hotel, he hasn’t made a single joke about being married. Doesn’t call her _wife_. Doesn’t make pointed comments to everyone around them, as he had been doing for the past week. She’s glad the shine has finally worn off, even if he’s still in a vaguely surly mood.

There’s a part of her that feels guilty for it. Not because she thinks that Jaime’s serious about wanting to stay married, but because the only reason they’re even _doing_ this is because she cares about it. She can’t apologize for it. She doesn’t like the idea of being married to someone she has no intention of legally marrying, even if she doesn’t believe in the old gods. But it does, now that they’re here, seem like a bit of an overreaction.

It’s just. What if they _are_ real? What if they _are_ watching her? Jojen Reed had been a serious young man, nothing like the high, goofy teenager that Jaime has spent the last week describing to everyone. When he’d looked at Brienne, she had felt a shiver even in the overly warm hut. And no, she couldn’t make out what he was seeing in the smoke, but she had seen _something_ , hadn’t she?

Jaime will probably call it being overcautious, but she just doesn’t feel right about it. What if Brienne and Jaime accidentally did something disrespectful by marrying in the name of the old gods, saying the words as if they intended to keep those promises? It’s better to get it annulled as quickly as possible. She just hates feeling like she’s the stick in the mud. That’s what she used to be, back when they first worked together. Back then, it seemed like she was constantly jerking him around on a leash. Like he was a disobedient pup who hadn’t yet learned to follow a lead. Dragging him from responsibility to responsibility when he would have rather struck off on their own, following no roads or maps or guidelines laid out by his father. As the years have gone by, they’ve learned to lean on each other and trust each other, but this feels too much like back at the beginning. Like Jaime’s digging in his heels and Brienne is pressing his face into the mud, trying to get him to focus. She hates being that person.

There have been times during this week when she went to make a joke about it. Or when she went to tell him that maybe they _don’t_ have to get the fake marriage annulled. Like maybe it _is_ funny. Something has stopped her every time. This hot, annoyed, prickling feeling on her scalp, like a precursor to embarrassment. Like a full-bodied blush readying itself at the top of her skull so that it can spread down and announce itself, calling her a liar. Revealing her as a fraud. Proving that the reason she doesn’t joke about it is because she _can’t_ joke about it, because it would be too much.

It isn’t as if she’s spent the last near decade in love with him. She’d thought him handsome at first, and had been tongue-tied an annoying amount around him. Perhaps there had been a crush, or more than a crush. But it had _faded_. She had been so sure that she was free of it. But somehow, when she was sitting across from Jaime in that hut, when she looked into the smoke and listened to Jojen droning on and on about cycles and rebirths and second chances, she found herself examining him for the first time in years and feeling something beyond what she was used to feeling for him. And when Jojen announced that they were wed in the eyes of the old gods…well. It was like her heart had been a dead motor, suddenly jumpstarted, engine turning over violently. _Shit_ , she had thought. _I love him_.

She can’t remember if it has always been there, lurking, or if it’s new, or if it’s just some impulse, some left over girlish desire to be married that is trying to trick her adult self into thinking that Jaime is someone she should pin her hopes on. _Jaime,_ who hasn’t had a serious relationship in all the time that Brienne has known him. Jaime, who is her best friend, who infuriates her, who moved into her apartment on a temporary basis three years ago and then somehow tricked her into never kicking him out. Maybe her mind has trapped itself, convinced itself that it’s just a few easy steps from where they are now to where they’d need to be if they wanted to be properly married. Maybe that’s all, and she has nothing to worry about.

But maybe it’s something else. She can’t take that chance.

Whatever it is, she wants it gone. Exorcised, removed from her brain. She needs to believe that going to Jojen and getting him to reverse the marriage rite is going to do away with it.

* * *

“There was no mistake,” Jojen Reed says.

“Knew it,” Jaime replies, pointedly, in Brienne’s direction. She rolls her eyes and takes another picture of the scene, because she likes the contrast; when they were here last, it was night, and there was an air of mystery and gravitas to the young Greenseer. Now, it’s day, and Jojen is an earnest, skinny, small-for-his-age boy wearing flannel pajama bottoms and sporting an unholy case of bedhead. “Kid, your father said he’d tell you we were coming.”

“And I told him that you were welcome. I didn’t tell him I’d interfere with the wishes of the old gods by undoing what has been done.”

“Jojen, please,” Brienne says politely. “We aren’t upset. But our intention was to take part in a Greenseeing ritual, not a marriage rite. We’d like that marriage annulled. Your father said that you could perform it.”

“I could,” the boy agrees happily, if a bit sleepily. “But like I said. I’d be interfering with the wishes of the old gods, and I’d rather not. I explained it all to you that night. It’s what was meant to happen.”

“I understand that,” Jaime says. He gets this voice when he’s talking to people he’s beginning to hate. Patient and friendly and utterly false. “And if it was up to me, I’d just let the old gods think what they want to think. But it’s important to my friend here that the old gods don’t get the wrong idea about the two of us.” He leans in, like he’s telling a friendly joke. “She has her heart set on marrying a Crannogman one day.”

Jojen seems confused by the joke, and he eyes Brienne’s height doubtfully before turning back to look at Jaime.

“What’s done is done,” he says, apologetically, in a tone that reminds Brienne of a much older man.

* * *

“All right,” Jaime says as he gets back in the passenger seat of the car they rented to come out here. Brienne slides into the driver’s seat and looks back in the rearview mirror at Jojen, who’s standing on his front porch, watching them with a pleasant smile that says he knows exactly how annoyed both Jaime and Brienne are with him. “Let’s head back to Greywater Watch and get his dad involved.”

“You think it’ll work?”

“You still want the divorce?” Jaime points out, and Brienne grunts and puts the car into gear. Being back here in the day, she’s annoyed to find that she still feels _something_. It wasn’t just the creepiness of the night or the fact that Jojen looked a lot more legit in his ceremonial garb than he does rolling out of bed in the middle of the afternoon. Jaime glares out the window in a _mood_ as they take the roads back to where they can meet the ferry to take them to the moving castle, but eventually he starts bitching about Jojen’s attitude and trying not to laugh about the whole thing, which feels much more Jaime than the surly silence. By the time they’re ushered into Howland’s office, he’s laughing about Jojen’s attitude, and Howland is grinning at them. Brienne manages a few polite chuckles, but she’s glad Jaime does most of the talking.

The last time they were here, interviewing Howland about the miraculous construction of Greywater Watch and the Reed family history, it had been in a much more official capacity. Howland had been serious, polite, dutifully kind, and the consummate host. Now, he starts laughing almost as soon as Jaime starts telling the story. It’s that wheezy, breathless kind of laugh that Brienne’s father _also_ had, and it makes Brienne like him even more, even though he’s laughing at _them_.

“My son takes the Sight very seriously,” he says when Jaime has caught him up on the situation. “If he says he saw something in the smoke, it will be difficult to convince him that he should ignore it. Luckily for you both, my daughter Meera is home for the festival, and she’s always had better luck getting Jojen to play nice. I’ll have her go down and talk to him. Hopefully he’ll be feeling in a more generous mood by tomorrow. In the meantime, I invite you enjoy the festival. I know it wasn’t in your original plans, but I think you’ll find there’s more than enough to write about in the second week as well!”

* * *

“I think he’s in on it,” Jaime decides as they make their way back to the hotel. It’s not far from the ferry, so they can walk it, but the streets are crowded with tourists. Greywater is still mostly undeveloped, so the tourists it attracts are typically the kinds of people who would rather hike than shop, but this developed strip of land in the middle of the town is still shockingly busy. Jaime would normally insist that they stop and check out some of these bars and nightclubs and street vendors, even though they did all this last week, at least so he could compare the first and second weeks of the festival, but he seems distracted now. Maybe he’s finally realizing that they might be stuck like this.

“He’s not _in on it_ ,” Brienne laughs. She feels a bit like an asshole for being relieved that he’s annoyed about it now. At least he’s taking it seriously. It does away with some of the annoyance she’s been feeling about and towards him all week. “He just knows his son, and he knows it isn’t going to be easy to convince him.”

“You heard him at the end there! He’s _thrilled_ I’m here for the second week even though we already determined that nothing happens in the second week except the rafts coming in the opposite direction. The exciting part was watching them move against the current! Now they’re just regular rafts. No Crannogmen ingenuity at all.”

“It’s his job to make it sound exciting. And this is good press for them. The tourism for the Green Fork festival is probably a huge amount of their revenue.”

“I hate when you’re reasonable about things when I want to be annoyed about them,” Jaime grumbles, but he’s smiling, and she knows he doesn’t _really_ hate it. Jaime loves when she’s reasonable and responsible about things, mostly because it means he doesn’t have to be.

He still spends the rest of the walk back to the hotel bitching about Howland Reed and regaling her with conspiracy theories about how this whole thing was orchestrated because when he writes the story about their accidental marriage and inevitable annulment, it’s going to be the kind of funny story that people will click on and remember.

“If he _did_ organize it, he’s a genius,” Jaime declares when they get back into their suite. He sets up on the couch on his laptop, still half sulking, and Brienne leaves him there to take a shower and a precious five minute break away from his complaints.

Once she’s back out in the living room, Jaime seems a bit calmer. He looks good in glasses, which she has _always_ thought, and he looks especially attractive all disgruntled and irritated as he types up his notes from earlier. When she enters the room, he looks up, surprised.

“You’re not done yet?” she asks, feeling a truly inconvenient wave of affection for him. His sleepy, grumpy frown. The disheveled quality to his hair. The glasses and the rolled up sleeves and the fact that he’s frowning at the screen as he types. She started off their relationship disdaining him, and then admiring him, and then becoming so much his friend that she forgot the admiration part. But sometimes, like now, she thinks of how hard he works, and how hard he _worked_ to get where he is. Watching him type with both hands, the flesh and blood and the prosthetic, watching him put in these extra hours and work hard to write a good article for Greywater even though he probably really _does_ believe that Howland did this whole thing on purpose.

“Catelyn wants to post the first part of the article tomorrow,” he says.

“About last week?”

“The first part of the festival, yeah. Pia still has my stupid video confessional in editing, but Cat wants to post the article first anyway. Drum up interest for the whole ‘accidental marriage’ thing. I’m just adding a few paragraphs at the end to tease it.”

“Okay,” she says, because she can’t read his tone. It’s unusual for Jaime. He’s a thunderstorm of a person, constantly emoting and laughing and sparkling. Alive in every way. For him to be so steady and blank is unusual, and she doesn’t know how to react.

“Your name will be kept out of it,” he says. “Don’t worry. Catelyn agreed we should just refer to you as _a friend_ who accompanied me, so you can still be credited for the pictures without suspicion.”

“Okay,” she says again. “Thank you.” It’s not like Jaime is as famous as his movie star sister or his politician little brother, but there’s still a certain amount of fame leftover from his days at his father’s company and his award-winning pieces on war-torn areas. She’s not exactly sure _who_ would care about the identity of Jaime’s mystery bride, but…well. There’s still a part of her that dreads being looked at. Being seen. Becoming the butt of the joke. It’s been years since high school, when the taunting was at its worst. Years, and she is so much more confident now than she was then. If there was a storm to be weathered, she could weather it. If they laughed at Jaime for being married to a woman taller and broader and uglier than him, with a facial scar and a resting scowl and an apparent lack of humor, then she would survive that, because she knows that Jaime would not find those jokes funny, and that he would continue to love her and support her no matter what those people would say.

She notices that he has stopped typing, and he’s watching her. She still can’t read the expression on his face, and that’s frightening. She’s so used to knowing him.

“What is it?” she asks him, and he shakes his head.

“Nothing,” he says, too quickly. “I should shower.”

He shuts his laptop down, rather than asking her to read the article, like he usually would. He still seems not himself. Off-balanced, somehow. She wants to ask him what’s wrong, but she doesn’t. She sits down on the couch after he’s gone, and she can’t banish her nervousness. This feeling like something isn’t quite right. It’s paranoid foolishness, but she can’t stop thinking it: _has he noticed?_

Did he notice that something was different with her? Did he put it together? Jaime’s a smart man, as much as he loves to play the fool even with people who know him too well to believe it. And more than smart, he’s _observant_. He understands people. He understands _her_ best of all. She was sure that she was hiding her resurgence of inappropriate, bothersome _feelings_ for him, but what is more powerful? Her ability to hide her emotions or his ability to sniff them out?

* * *

The next day, they take a guided tour through some of the ruins that they didn’t have time to see on their last trip. They do some souvenir shopping and eat at a few small restaurants that Jaime can add to his follow-up. By the time they’re ready to meet with Howland, Jaime’s back to enjoying himself. As much as he complains, he _does_ love his job, and even if it turns out that Howland tricked them into this scheme for more exposure for his festival, Brienne knows that Jaime is enjoying the excuse to take more time in Greywater. Back when they were working for the Lannisters, they used to spend _months_ in certain places, taking in as much of the culture as they could before Jaime would write his award-winning piece and they’d return home, forever changed. Catelyn’s model is punchier, more modern, more suited to lists and videos and bite-sized content that can be consumed on a smartphone. In a way, it sometimes makes Brienne sad, but it’s so much more accessible than the pieces Jaime used to write, and people all over the world can enjoy it without being subscribed to Jaime’s father’s expensive magazine. Plus, there’s no denying Jaime was _made_ for vlogs, as stupid as he claims to find them. Not that his charm wasn’t already dangerous in word form, but there’s something extra lethal about him when he’s speaking directly into a camera. No wonder poor, pretty Pia, the video editor, has such a crush on him.

Brienne tries to convince herself that that’s all this is. This oddness, this springing-up of feelings she thought she had done away with a long time ago. It’s an increased exposure maybe mixed with a forcible reminder that she once _did_ have romantic feelings for him. It’s not just because those feelings have only ever been inexpertly hidden, rather than done away with in truth. But it’s difficult, when watching him, to convince herself of that fact. Maybe the truth just is, despite all the quirks that she claims to hate, Jaime is an inherently lovable man, and she loves him.

* * *

Howland greets them with welcome news: Jojen has been convinced to reverse the rite.

“He’s not happy about it,” Howland reveals with a chuckle. “He says it’s a waste of everyone’s time, and claims the old gods don’t follow our rules anyway, so all he can promise is that he’ll do his best to lie to them on your behalf. So…congratulations.”

“Thanks,” Jaime says dryly. “I’m sure it’ll be a beautiful ceremony.”

Howland chuckles at that, too, but doesn’t argue. Jojen will welcome them to his hut a few hours after sunset, and until then there’s nothing to do but wait and enjoy the festival. Jaime sends another pointed look in Brienne’s direction when Howland reminds them of that, but he goes cheerfully enough out into the courtyard of the castle, where the festivities are continuing. They saw a lot of this the last time they were here, but Brienne had enjoyed herself then, and she enjoys herself this time, as well. She gets caught up in a dance in the center of the square, and Jaime laughs at her as she tries to keep up with the steps and keeps tripping over her feet. Jaime goes around interviewing festivalgoers and charming everyone he meets, and Brienne cuts through the crowd, taking pictures of everything, lulled into the quiet happiness she always feels when she gets into the zone with her work.

She finds a quiet corner when it starts to get dark so that she can look through some of the photos. There are a few that she particularly likes, so she transfers them to the shared folder she and Jaime use when they’re in the field, both to keep each other updated and to keep Catelyn in the loop.

When she’s finished transferring, she sees a document titled _Brienne_.

She doesn’t even think about it.

She opens it.

It’s not like he’s ever left her instructions before in the shared folder, but for some reason, that’s what she assumes the document is. It’s alongside documents like _Notes_ , _Draft1_ , _Jojens a dick_ and other clear Jaime-written pieces. Why wouldn’t she open it?

She makes it three lines before she realizes that she isn’t meant to see this. Or maybe she _is_ meant to see this, but only as a kind of bizarre _gesture_. She closes out of it immediately, but then opens it again after a few moments of sitting silently on her bench, trying to forget that it happened.

It’s not directed _to_ her. It’s not written like a love letter, or a confession. But it’s _about_ her.

She can’t read it fully. Not that first time. It’s like looking too directly at the sky on a bright day. She skims it, instead. Picks up on pieces of it. _I accidentally married my best friend_ , it starts.

It’s an article, she realizes. It’s an article that he’s not going to finish. Not going to publish, because he told her that her name wasn’t going to be involved. But it’s the article he _would_ write, if he could, and she _knows_ this. She knows him. She understands. He calls himself a coward in it. He calls himself too afraid to tell her. But it feels like bravery to Brienne. A kind of bravery, anyway. Writing it at all. She has been desperately shoving her feelings back into their box all week, trying to pretend that she doesn’t have them. Jaime, at least, is willing to recognize them for what they are. He wrote about them, spoke them, made them real. And he saved them in a place where there was every chance she might find them. How long has that document been in that folder? How long has he been waiting for her to find it?

Something possesses her as she leaves her dark corner and goes in search of him. If she were any younger, maybe she would think it was a joke. Some attempt to get a laugh out of her. She would pretend not to have seen it. She would pretend like it never happened, and so would he, and then maybe they would remain stubbornly, separately in love with each other for years.

Hells, maybe that’s what has already happened. Now that she has read his thoughts, it seems to her that she can remember a million other times that Jaime has said something, or looked too deeply at her, or gotten too close, and Brienne has had to force herself not to think about it. Has he known all this time? Has he suspected? Or did he think he was the only one?

She finds him at last standing on the outskirts of the courtyard, eating some stall-bought food and looking fairly content. She freezes for a moment where he cannot see her, wondering if she should continue. But it’s only a moment. She has never felt so confident. So right. He’s her best friend, and she knows him, and she knows that she has seen into the heart of him, now.

“Jaime,” she says, when she gets close, and he turns to smile at her. The smile falters when he sees her expression, because he _does_ , more than anything else, know her. Knows her and loves her, if his own words are to be believed, and she _does_ believe them. “Jaime, what’s this?” she asks, and she hands over her phone. Jaime only glances at the screen before swallowing heavily and handing it back.

“Right,” he says. And that’s it.

“Right?” she prompts.

“I’m thinking.”

“You’re not so hopeless with technology that I’ll believe you didn’t save this here on purpose. You knew I might see it.”

“Yes, but I sort of hoped you wouldn’t.”

“ _Why_ would you save it there, then?”

“Because I sort of hoped you would.”

He sounds almost as confused and upset as she feels, and it’s funny, for a moment. She bites back a laugh, but he sees it, and he smiles helplessly.

“How long?” she asks.

“I don’t know. A while.”

“Why now, then?”

“Because I thought…there were two reasons why you’d be so desperate to have this stupid fake marriage annulled. Either because you actually gave a shit what the old gods of some chronically baked swamp-dweller think, or because it hit too close to home and it frightened you.” He’s looking at her too carefully, and it makes her want to look away, cowed by the intensity of his stare. She forces herself to keep steady.

“Why haven’t you ever said anything before?”

“Are you _really_ not going to tell me which one it was?”

“You already know, or you wouldn’t have written what you did.”

At her pointed comment, Jaime grins a little. Maybe he _did_ already know, but he’s clearly relieved to hear it.

“I didn’t say anything before,” he starts slowly. “Because…I don’t know. I thought at first you hated me, and then you tolerated me. And then we had our accident, and that created a bond that I didn’t understand. I don’t think I realized it was love at first. Not love like I know it is now. I’d never felt it for anyone else. I didn’t think I _could_. I just knew that I wanted to spend time with you, and work with you, and that our partnership made me feel better about my work than I’d felt in a long time. You helped me escape from my father’s company. You’re the reason I found the Brotherhood. But at a certain point, I had to acknowledge that I was just afraid of naming this what it was, so I was pretending it was something else. And I was never sure how you felt. You’re very good at hiding yourself away. Sometimes I thought you were looking at me in a particular way, and I’d feel…I don’t know. As if I was a fool for not saying something. But I always talked myself out of it. I was too old. Or too much a mess. Or too much your friend. It’s such a stupid cliché when someone doesn’t act out of fear of ruining what they already have, but that’s exactly what it was. Now you.”

“Hm?” Brienne asks. She doesn’t think anyone has ever said something so nice to her before, and she’s already annoyed with him for ruining it with that shitty, smug tone on the last question.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I made myself stop thinking about it years ago,” she admits. “So there was nothing to mention. But it all came back, for some reason.”

“For some reason,” he repeats, grinning. “Was it the crack I made about changing my bedroom into an office?”

He’s giving her an out, here, and she knows it. He’s allowing her to joke, to banter, to turn this lighthearted enough that they can avoid real conversation. Maybe he will kiss her anyway, when the laughter is done. Maybe they’ll go back to their hotel room and fuck. But they won’t have to talk about it if she doesn’t want to, because he knows her so well.

“No,” she forces herself to say. “It was after Jojen performed the ceremony. When he told us that the old gods had blessed our union, and that it was what was meant to happen. You were already laughing about it, but I couldn’t. Because I realized I wanted it to be true.”

He smiles at her, then. Not a grin, or a smirk, or one of a thousand Jaime expressions that deflect emotion more than show it. A true, beaming smile, and he’s beautiful like this. _Happy_.

* * *

They end up canceling on Jojen. Not like they think it makes them any more married now, but it _is_ , maybe, a bit funny as long as Brienne isn’t trying to stifle her own emotions. Jaime writes the rest of his article on their plane ride home, and Catelyn laughs aloud when she reads the final product. Brienne’s name still isn’t mentioned, but anyone who’s ever met them will probably know who Jaime’s writing about when he describes his tall best friend with stunning eyes and an endless well of patience for his nonsense.


End file.
